The Flame Game (Magical Romantic Comedies #12) - R.J. Blain Page 0,26
stealing mine.”
“That was half the fun, Queeny.” I considered what my father had said about the timing of my husband and his cheating ex-wife. “My father thinks Audrey is more significant than we might appreciate. As such, your job is to look into recorded gorgon matters from when you met her, before she met you, and up until she started being a cheating asshole. That way, I won’t interrogate you again with stupid questions and reminders I made your life a living nightmare until you were able to wisely ditch her. I think my father may be right about one thing he told me, though. She was totally a training program so you could cope with the disaster I tend to be.”
“You’re not a disaster, Bailey. That said, I did learn a lot about tolerance, patience, and keeping my cool while married to her, that is for certain. No, she wasn’t a good wife, but I also wasn’t the ideal husband for her, either. Frankly, after a year or two, I think we had equal disdain for each other. Honestly, even without your help with that, the marriage wouldn’t have lasted much longer. You just made it a lot easier for me to get through the paperwork and take minimal financial losses from my stupidity.”
“You weren’t stupid, Sam.”
“Oh, I was. I was young, tired of being treated like a stud, and she offered a loveless marriage. She did her fair share of treating me like a stud, but since I had agreed to marry her, it seemed fair.”
“All she gave you was a loveless marriage with a side of bad sex.” I frowned, considering my husband. “Well, bad sex for you. I can’t imagine you being capable of not doing your best by your partner. The whole incubus thing.”
“That whole incubus thing is why we ever had sex at all,” he muttered, shaking his head before reaching over me and snagging my work laptop. “I’m borrowing this because I’m too lazy to go get mine, which is buried somewhere under the presents.”
“It’s gone forever. Goodbye, laptop. Rest in pieces.”
“The presents aren’t that heavy. Well, most of them. I’m sure my laptop is fine.”
As trudging through the CDC’s database gave me a headache on a good day, I downloaded every rabies treatment record for the past ten years, dumped them into a spreadsheet, and groaned at the eighty thousand records, amazed the laptop and the program could handle so many results. “Rabies is even more of a problem than I thought. Looks like eight thousand on average a year that have been reported to the CDC in the past decade.”
“And who knows how many cases weren’t reported to the CDC,” my husband muttered, shaking his head. “Now I understand why the other chiefs told me I’d appreciate the shit I dodged before being dumped into my rank.”
“At least I had some training before being thrown at you.”
“Yeah. You’re definitely better trained than I was before I became a cop. Actually, I think you’re better trained than most of our cops. You just have unconventional training, and you’re missing some of the fundamentals. That’s something we’re going to have to address once we’re at the station. I want to revamp our training programs.”
“Do you have any say over training programs?”
“I have a lot of control over what supplementary training courses my cops go through after they’re out of the academy. I’m thinking I will see if we can hire one or two extra cops so we can have an hour of supplementary training as a part of every shift. I also have some concerns about our gun handling. I’d like to see Amanda run more cops through unarmed training. General gun usage has been down, so there are concerns of inappropriate use of force.”
“I’m going to regret having a salary, aren’t I?”
“Matching work shifts,” he reminded me. “That means more sleep for you, my beautiful.”
“You’re just making me walk the walk after talking about how good I am at budgeting.”
“You’re not just good at budgeting, Bailey. If someone told me you were a goddess of budgeting, I would believe them. I’ve seen what you’ve done with our household budget. And not only do you handle the budget to save us money, you do not shirk on the quality. That is very important—we can’t afford to shirk in terms of quality and services, so the budget is a very careful dance.”
“The budget doesn’t have enough in it for coffee,” I warned him.